morganome 's review for:

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
5.0

I will read any author featured on the Tin House podcast, Between the Covers, and really enjoyed hearing Isabella Hammad in conversation with David Naimon, which led me to Enter Ghost.

I loved this book, charting 38-year-old Sonia’s return to Palestine and her participation in a West Bank production of Hamlet. Hamlet is my second-favorite Shakespeare play and provides such rich material for diving into the inner worlds of the actors in the novel. I was reminded of a favorite This American Life episode from 2002, Act Five, which follows a production of Hamlet within the carceral system. Hamlet takes on new meaning depending on the context in which it’s staged, where the play is taking place, and who is acting within it.

On a formal level, the play-within-the-novel sections were clever and helped break up the dense narrative. Hammad writes about the ongoing realities of occupation in a seamless way, weaving violence and unease into descriptions of daily life or play rehearsals. Despite being political and musing on the role of art/theater in exposing oppression and injustice, the novel is deeply psychological. The balancing of quotidian details (Sonia’s tense relationship with her sister, the nuances of Palestinian diasporic identity, the aftermath of her marriage and a subsequent affair) with philosophical questions of activism and resistance reminded me of Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, which also blends personal and political in a restrained and illuminating way.

Podcasts mentioned:

https://tinhouse.com/podcast/isabella-hammad-enter-ghost/

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/218/act-v